The Art of Becoming a Biohazard
by Yarrie - Water Master
Summary: Before Izaya was an omniscient informant, he was an omniscient informant in training. Naturally, he sharpens his technique by stabbing the rest of the population with it. Over and over. Collection of oneshots, wide timeline. Part 6: "I want somebody to rape me." WARNING: possible triggers.
1. Chapter 1

Because I haven't given Izaya a voice in a long time. Literally.

This is a fairly quiet one-shot with craploads of information written between the lines. The others in the series will probably be louder and more obnoxious.

* * *

**Butterflies  
**

* * *

There is one thing that distinguishes thirteen year old Izaya from the person he grows up to be.

It's a little thing called _everything_.

This is not an exaggeration. "Everything" means exactly what the dictionary says it ought to mean, which is convenient, because that doesn't usually happen with Izaya - not with adult Izaya, anyways.

Izaya at thirteen is a different matter.

He isn't even fast enough to outrun the yakuza yet, much less his own sanity. He is constantly bored, and just as often, boring. He's incredibly bad at staying entertained, but not quite bad _enough_ for adult Izaya's taste. He has no people to love, he has no love for people. The only personal weapon he owns is an old penknife that doesn't flick open, and it's so impractical to stand there trying to pull the blade out with his fingernails that he never uses it.

Above all else, he is _subtle_, and who the hell has ever heard of a subtle Izaya?

It's inexcusable how careful he has to be to pursue his hobby of manipulating people (_this_, at least, has always been a part of him), but at thirteen, he doesn't have the influence over the local law enforcement that his future self takes for granted. He has to get creative - because police officers are so unimaginative, you know, and none of them would appreciate his attempts to make the world a more interesting place.

But precisely because they are so unimaginative, they have no idea that someone like Izaya is behind the string of bizarre crimes in the city. Izaya is free to do whatever he wants, short of causing the apocalypse. He's saving _that _particular game for a rainy day.

Here's the thing, though: Izaya's still a kid. He's not a _normal_ one, admittedly, and it's true that most of his inner child will actually follow him into adulthood, but right now being a kid means that he's stuck in the only period of his life when he has to actively avoid jailtime. Which means that he goes about doing things the most complicated, indirect way possible. This takes time. And planning. And information. Lots of it.

But the breed of information that thirteen-year-old Izaya collects is shamefully unremarkable, because it's the sort of thing even normal stalkers could figure out: a simple mixture of daily routines and nightly shenanigans. He hates being in the business of predictability but he needs this information to make sure that people meet and bounce off of each other the way he wants them to.

In the future, he will not worry so much about making schedules match up, because he will be able to create new ones for his humans at the snap of his fingers. But this is not the future. Izaya is not yet a walking coincidence. So, he stockpiles dozens of - hundreds of - thousands of spreadsheets with long, fluid timetables. His version of the stereotypical childhood rock collection, if you will.

He cuts into people's lives at the various points where they intersect. And it's so easy he could cry, except he hasn't learned how to cry on command yet either.

It only takes a change of ten seconds to throw off - or correct - somebody's fate.

And Izaya may be young but he already knows how to wind the clock, sometimes a little fast, sometimes a little slow, but always with the very best intentions in mind.

It isn't something that he has to teach himself - nor is it something that can be taught, in general.

It's just something he can do.

If he pulls the timeline this-a-way today, he can force a bus driver to leave home ten seconds too late, sitting impatiently in traffic behind the scene of an accident instead of running his normal route, causing a pregnant woman who is waiting at the bus stop to stand in the heat with her groceries for fifteen minutes, which wilts her bean sprouts beyond recognition, forcing her husband to leave work early the next day for a quick grocery trip to satisfy her cravings, which allows the unscrupulous Tuesday cashier to steal his credit card information. Of course, the timing has to be perfectly exact for that particular scenario, but typically Izaya doesn't need such precision to cause a disaster anywhere, anytime.

It's so simple that a thirteen-year-old could do it.

It's so simple because it _is_ a thirteen-year-old that's doing it.

Izaya thinks of this method as cheating because, at any given moment, the average person just so _happens_ to evade millions of possibilities to get through their day unscathed. All he has to do is ask for a ten second delay somewhere and boom. It's so easy that he could do it in his sleep (and he actually _has_, you know, which is why he has to change his computer password every few days so that his fingers never get enough muscle memory to type it in his sleep).

The chain reaction that connects the tiniest of events together is very tenuous, like spun cotton candy, but Izaya has vision, and a really big reservoir of luck. He is far more successful than he ought to be.

There is, for instance, nothing significant about the fact that Molly-san the expatriate Englishwoman on the first floor has a cat named Poppy. And across the street, seemingly unrelated, lives a quiet girl named Mitsuko who has debilitating hypnophobia. There is nothing particularly interesting about her, either.

But. Look. Look! Holed up in the apartment on the floor below little Mitsuko, a quietly desperate wife is dressed in unseasonably warm clothing that covers her skin, and she is staring at the cans of cheap beer that her husband has been drinking all night.

In the various degrees of separation between the three of them, there is the easily distracted mailman who loves animals, the chatty mail-order pharmacist who writes _Good luck_ on all of prescriptions that her company fills, the psychiatrist who prescribes Mitsuko a bottle of potent sleeping pills, and the bottle itself, which ends up in the wrong person's hands...all because Izaya borrows Poppy without permission for a day or two.

The mailman is the technically first domino to fall when he rushes through work to help Molly-san search for her kitty, but he is also the last step in the process, because everything else is already done for Izaya.

This is how the quietly desperate wife ends up with a brown paper package on her steps, marked by a scarily personal-looking note that says _Good luck_.

You figure the rest out.

He once managed a twenty-step chain reaction. It's still his record, in fact.

But by that point, the game bores him so much that he only plays occasionally.

The obvious problem is that, after a while, the same scenario begins to repeat one too many times, and it becomes far too effortless. No challenge, no fun.

The deeper problem is that Izaya sticks to static characters, people whose personalities are fleshed out and solid and stubborn. They are easy to predict and they slide neatly into disaster scenarios, but there is no spontaneity. Just like with reality television and holiday mistletoe, the entertainment value of a really bad situation comes from eyebrow-raising surprise.

He _needs_ to get other obsessive habits, and to improve the ones that he already has.

And he doesn't want to wait.

But Izaya is still thirteen years old, and puberty is hellish enough without him trying to grow up faster.


	2. Chapter 2

Izaya, meet your would-be bully. Sorry to disappoint you, kid. VERY sorry to disappoint you, Izaya.

* * *

**Extracurriculars  
**

* * *

There are very, very few things that fourteen year old Izaya will not put up with. He makes it a policy, you see, to rid himself of all things human, and that category definitely includes pet peeves.

That's why he doesn't get angry when the big kid in the corner starts saying rotten things about him. There's no point in fighting gossip, especially at this age.

When the lies turn into tiny actions, like breaking his things and stealing his work...well, that's fine too. At some point, it will escalate, and when it does, he is perfectly poised to take advantage of it. Like a cataract, dissension should not be harvested until it's perfectly ripe.

And it's not like he's doing it just for kicks, you know.

Izaya's sadism is painfully restricted by how much (or how little) he knows about human anatomy - and psychology, too, but he's a lot better with the latter than the former. Honestly, letting the other kids beat him up is just another way to research exactly which body targets are best for torture. It's not the most efficient way, certainly, but Izaya has never been one to go looking for more trouble when the trouble in front of him is already plenty educational.

It escalates sooner than he expects, which is nice. After the disastrous boredom of his thirteenth year, unpredictability is always welcome.

And it doesn't begin slowly, either. The kid literally goes from mocking Izaya with, "You think you're so much better than us? Huh?" to ganging up on him after school with a couple of idiots at his back. They beat him with their fists, their knees, their elbows, their feet - but not necessarily in the most effective order. Still, Izaya quickly learns where it hurts the most: the solar plexus, the knees, the wrists, the neck, the jawbone...and the more he knows, the more satisfied he feels about their little sessions together. The pain is temporary, the knowledge is forever.

His almost-tormentors don't break anything, but they do come close, and he knows that he's going to get some lovely bruises out of it - but that's also another opportunity lying in wait. It's surprisingly easy to disguise any injury if you know what you're doing, and Izaya learns fast...although admittedly he's been studying abuse victims - mostly basket cases - for over a year. He already knows all the tricks of the trade secondhand, but injury-hiding is an art like any other, so there is no substitute for practice.

In the meantime, the boys keep coming back for more, loudly daring each other to push harder and farther with every session. The big one with flabby arms is their leader, unofficially, but with every fresh idea the other two ply him with, Izaya can see that control slipping.

Sometimes they insult him coherently while they hit him, priceless little cliches like "You think you're so smart? Well, study my fucking fist!"

More often than not, though, the conversation sinks into a sad mixture of curse words and insults so that they can concentrate all of their brainpower on trying to make him suffer.

Izaya thinks of the arrangement as a temporary extracurricular activity, and he schedules the rest of his afternoons around the beatings.

Even so, things fall apart pretty quickly.

During lunch one day, the leader of the group rifles through a stack of Izaya's papers while he sits on Izaya's desk. Izaya just stares at him from the ground, wiping blood from his nose. He doesn't keep anything particularly incriminating at school for obvious reasons, but it's still troublesome to let these idiots touch his things. He almost forgets his role for an instant - but only an instant. Really. "Hey, Orihara, look what I got!" The unofficial leader of the group flips to the first page."Woah, what an ugly chick. This your girlfriend or something?"

"That's my _notebook,_ and I don't see why you need to look at it," Izaya says, very matter-of-factly.

"Hey, you shut up, I've got it and there's nothing you can do about it," he glares down at Izaya, and one of his followers gives their target an obliging kick in the ribs. Izaya focuses on remembering which papers he brought today - ah, yes, the entire biography of eighteen-year-old Minako Tsuyori. Not a particularly interesting case for them to violate his privacy on.

But, since he generally has zero personal interest in others, Izaya feels the need to defend his celibacy. "And she's not my - "

"God, I knew you were screwy in the head but I didn't know you were a _stalker,_" the would-be bully sneers, wrinkling his nose in disgust at the next few pages, which Izaya has filled with details about her daily routine.

"She's not my girlfriend, she's the girl who lives two streets across from me," Izaya scolds lightly, "and she's probably going to the hospital today because she jumped off the roof."

"She...what?" He looks and sounds like he's a little broken. "_What?_"

Well, isn't that interesting? Even bullies get to have their moments of humanity, huh. Izaya smiles benignly, still wiping away blood from his nose. "I saw her this morning when I went to school. Well, I saw her falling from the roof, I didn't actually see the ambulance or anything. For all I know she might be dead already - so I guess it's not completely accurate to say that she'll probably be in a hospital today."

The two boys who had been kicking him glance at each other with petrified looks on their faces, like pathetic mosquitoes who have finally realized that the animals they suck blood from can actually kill them with no effort at all.

Izaya's smile widens. "Take a good look at that picture," he advises, "Might be useful...if she survives, I mean. You might even be the person to identify her body someday. Fate is kind of funny that way."

The unofficial ring leader is the first to break out of his horrified shock, or at least the first to regain his voice. "You sick...you sick _freak!_"

Izaya just tilts his head innocently. "Okay, sure. Let's say that I really am a sick freak. Well, boys, you ought to be proud of yourselves! You were very, very good teachers."

"I'm not - we didn't - "

Ah, let the wild denials begin. "Of course you did," he replies soothingly, "No need to hide it, really. Why else would you enjoy hitting me so much? It's all about what makes you feel good. I'm feeling pretty good right now, aren't you?"

The logic there isn't completely sound, but he's not trying to argue his point on rational grounds. He doesn't need to use his brain to look down on hopeless idiots. While the other boys just stand there blubbering, Izaya starts walking away with a quiet, expectant smirk.

He doesn't even make it three steps before the big kid grabs him by the shoulder and tries to slam him into the wall. This time, Izaya stands his ground and pushes back just enough to fight his momentum. "What are you trying to pull now?" he asks, with a bored but polite smile on his face.

"I'm gonna beat you up, you creepy piece of shit - "

Oh, but Izaya's had enough already, and he can tell that there's nothing more to learn here...not if it takes so little to intimidate them. "No," he says pleasantly, "you already had your chance." He closes the door with his hand, not once breaking eye contact, and locks it with an unsettling click. Then he removes a number of freshly sharpened pencils, floss, and a package of gauze bandages from his backpack. "Don't worry. I'll clean you up after I'm done."


	3. Chapter 3

The things you have to consider when you become an actual criminal.

* * *

**Cutting Edge**

* * *

Izaya likes sharp pointy things. He likes them _a lot_.

Now, normally this isn't a problem. Sharp pointy objects come in handy when you're trying to cut somebody's face off, for instance - or when you're just _threatening_ to cut somebody's face off. In Izaya's line of work, there's a time and place for both. There are _many_ times and places for both.

He'd be hard-pressed to find someone who's willing to sell a fourteen-year-old a gun, but knives? No problem. Never mind that it's easier to maim someone with a knife than with a gun, the law says that it's okay, so it's okay.

But if you've ever used a knife for longer than a month, then you know that there's one big, big issue with them.

They _get dull_.

Okay, to be fair, dull knives are actually preferable for torture because they don't cut cleanly. It has to do with surface tension, and sawing, and ripping. You can extract some _magnificent_ screaming from your victims this way. Still, dull knives only have an advantage over their sharper counterparts when the objective is torture and nothing else, but that's rarely the case with Izaya. He just doesn't specialize in _physical_ torture.

It's not that he minds the noise (that's what good earplugs are for, ask any professional and they'll tell you the same), he just doesn't like leaving behind so much _evidence_. There comes a point when the blood and gore is too messy to be worth the job satisfaction. Izaya doesn't get off on it like some of the people he knows. It's just too visible, and he doesn't like taking chances while Ikebukuro still has twenty or so police officers who haven't succumbed to the threat of blackmail yet. That said, he _does_ keep a cheap pumpkin carving knife for special occasions...

Problem: Cheap pumpkin carving knives aren't much use in a fight. They remind him of his silly old penknife, and Izaya likes to think that he's graduated from that level.

Problem: Izaya doesn't own a high-quality sharpening waterstone - and even if he did, how would he possibly find the time to sharpen all of his knives when there are so many humans who need to be loved? There simply aren't enough hours in a day.

Problem: Izaya refuses to let anyone else touch his weapons. Tampering is too easy. Being hated is too easy. Put together, it's obviously not a good idea.

Problem: Knives with disposable blades are terrible for self-defense, even if they _do_ have a lovely edge. Izaya once tried to block an incoming baseball bat with a scalpel that he borrowed from Shinra. It...didn't go so well. He still won the fight, of course, because cheap pumpkin carving knives aren't _completely_ useless, but it's no good having to rely on your backup knife.

Problem: Izaya needs a better way to terrorize people.

Solution: Izaya is going to get one.

The answer comes to him when he's reviewing bank statements one day - not his own, they belong to a pretty lady from Osaka - because that's when he suddenly realizes that he's sort of rich. Really, it's the kind of conclusion that you can only justify after you've seen the income of several thousand people. At some point, it becomes obvious that you have more assets to your name than three quarters of them, even _before_ you ruin their livelihoods. The information business pays well. Now, to be sure, he's not _rich_-rich, he's just rich enough to dwarf his parents' life savings. It's enough to make him think.

And think he does.

Izaya's first serious weapon was a switchblade. It would have been pretty swell to buy a katana, but he's always been practical about terrorizing the population - it's much easier to make somebody swallow a switchblade than a katana. The latter would just get stuck in the esophagus and ruin the effect. Why is it important to have a swallow-able weapon, you ask? Well, usually, it isn't important at all...but it's nice to have the possibility open, if he ever wants to make a statement. It's a show of control. It's a show of power.

So, naturally, his first weapon was a switchblade. His old penknife doesn't count for obvious reasons. The pumpkin carving knife doesn't count either, because he's never used it to kill anybody.

At the time Izaya decided to buy himself his first switchblade, though, he had been far too young and far too inexperienced to catch any clients of his own. He only managed to scrounge up enough cash after striking up a deal with the local counterfeiting ring. Even then, there was only so much cash a fourteen-year-old could use without raising a few suspicious eyebrows. He got away with his first knife because he fed the storeowner a sob story about accidentally losing his father's. The second was a little harder to explain away. And the third...ugh. After losing all three to swallowing incidents, he had been disappointed to realize that he couldn't support a steady supply of nice switchblades if he wanted to maintain his standards for a job well done. That's what got him started on the scalpels. They were sorry substitutes, but he dealt with it because he had to - and because both he and Shinra thought it was a brilliant way to repurpose old surgical kits. For the good of the Earth, you know.

All in all, the scalpels weren't that bad...

But Izaya doesn't accept _Not Bad_. He wants _Brilliant_. He wants _Magnificent. _He wants _Terrifying_. He wants _Godly._

He wants a lot of money and now he has it. And that's when the wheels in his convoluted little brain start grinding against each other like sawpaper.

Now, there are a lot of things he could do with a million yen. He could buy himself the rights to a corner of the yakuza's most discrete body dumping site, for instance. Or he could buy tons of lethal narcotics and build himself an army of addicts. Maybe even bribe the last stragglers in the police department who haven't caved to his blackmailing ways yet. They're all valid and reasonable choices and he gives each one careful and cautious consideration in the millisecond it takes for him to get bored.

So what does Izaya do with his newly rediscovered wealth? Why, he buys two cartons full of lovely, lovely switchblades, of course. He's _rich, _and he doesn't care to let his money go to waste. It makes perfect sense to gather up a huge supply of his favorite weapons so that he can dispose of them however he wants, whenever they get dull from their daily diet of bone and muscle.

Two enormous boxes of shiny knives.

Izaya can't wait to run out of them.


	4. Chapter 4

Izaya, hitting age 15...Just before meeting Shizuo.

* * *

**How-to**

* * *

This is how you make perfectly normal people kill themselves.

You start with a normal day. It has to be a normal day. There's no point in making things go horribly wrong for your humans if...well, if things are already going wrong. Adding stress on top of stress doesn't create fear. It leads to migraines and risk factors for cardiovascular failure, but that's not what you're going for. Fear is not a long-term project - if you're Izaya, it barely takes fifteen minutes.

That's right.

Just fifteen minutes to replenish the demand for suicide hotlines...as if there was ever any danger of a shortage.

And if you wonder why on earth someone like Izaya would develop a way to _shorten_ his enjoyment of something...well, you obviously don't understand the point of perfection. Izaya takes his art very seriously. Those fifteen minutes linger on his tongue for ages and ages until the taste of sweet achievement burns into his dreams.

It's only fifteen minutes out of your day. You can try it if you like.

You start with a normal day, and then you get your chosen human either completely alone, which is ideal - or alone within a group of strangers, if you want to challenge yourself. Or, if you _really really_ have something to prove, go after an entire happy family.

You start with a normal day, and then you choose a human - or humans - and then you cut them off from the rest of the world. No phones, no internet, no windows, no witnesses.

Got that? Normal day, pick your victim, cut them off, and after all that,_ finally_, you can do something frightening and enjoy the show. Izaya doesn't know how to teach this part to someone else. It comes too naturally to him, you see. In fact, most of the time he has to work hard not to turn normal, healthy fear into something pathological. There's merit to the theory that geniuses make the worst teachers.

Well? How is it?

Done correctly, your victims will never actually kill themselves until they're safe and sound in their homes. That's when the paranoia hits. They can't ever, ever escape the past, because they are convinced that they have no future.

Izaya has found that subtly stalking them at this point is actually overkill, because hallucinations do the job just as well, if not better. That's why he can afford to leave them alone to sputter to their final destinations. Just a guideline, though. All of these are guidelines. Izaya breaks them on a regular basis, because...just because.

After you get the hang of it, it's easy to make variations on the theme. There are different ways to handle men and women - though they're not as different as you might expect. Izaya happens to be male, so it's easier to do the ladies. It just is.

It has less to do with who HE is and more to do with how his humans perceive themselves. He crossdressed once, as an experiment. The man he was working on just fell into his hands like putty. It was disturbingly easy, so he never did it again.

Oh, and while we're on the subject - don't break your precious victims. Humans tend to lose interest in what you're doing if they break.

Ever tried pouring tea into a broken cup?

Yeah, it's like that.

Now, Izaya's not going to judge you if you really want to break someone, but personally he finds it excessive. Demolishing somebody from the inside out is a valuable skill to have, of course, but so is restraint. There's actually a very clear line between just enough torture and too much of it. It's just that most people who torture at all don't care about the distinction, shame on them. Unfortunately, there's nothing Izaya can do about that, or he would had already done it. Thoughtless torture is like packaged food, it's a sign of laziness.

Izaya graduated from that sort of thing a long time ago. Maybe a year or so. Nowadays he finds the indirect method much more interesting - which is odd, because it feels like he's circling back to the beginning. He remembers his thirteen-year-old self and a strange ball of nostalgia clenches in his gut.

But Izaya at age fifteen is not Izaya at thirteen. He's got enough experience under his belt to go back to his old ways with a self-satisfied smirk because he knows that sometimes the butterfly effect is impossibly useful.

But nowadays, his job mostly consists of talking. And talking. And talking.

Pain is cheating. It's easy to beat somebody to submission if you have the muscles and a baseball bat. It's not so easy to talk somebody into thinking, _I'm gonna die, he's gonna kill me, what's he waiting for, he's gonna kill me...dammit, just **do** it already, _especially if they don't have any experience with suicidal thoughts.

But humans are versatile creatures, after all, and they learn quickly.

He likes whispering into their ears that he's _boredboredbored_, murmuring that maybe he should wait until they're cuddling with their children to shoot them. Wouldn't it be _neat_ to see the way those cute little faces look after he pulls the trigger? Wouldn't it be the most precious thing in the world?_  
_

_Yesyesyes_, he would say to their terrified expressions, _that's what I'm going to do_.

This is how you take the gun, this is how you move your finger to touch the trigger, this is how you point the barrel straight and center -

This is how you leave someone hanging.


	5. Chapter 5

Izaya meets Shizu-chan. Then, for the first time in his life, he kills someone for no reason. But if you take him at face value, the two events are only chronologically related.

* * *

**THIS**

* * *

To be honest, when he first heard about Shizu-chan (_he's a monster_, they said, _don't mess with him_, they said) Izaya had been fully prepared to like him. Up until that point, he had never met a single human who was undeserving of his love. Up until that point, he had been inexperienced enough to believe that he never would.

And then he met Shizu-chan and _oh_, he really is a monster, but messing with him is so much fun. Impossibly fun. Inhumanly fun.

It's quite terrible, actually. Izaya is irritated by the fact that he _can't stop playing _with Shizu-chan. There are times when he knows that he ought to stop, because playtime always throws his scheduling out of whack, but he doesn't. On the day they met, courtesy of the impromptu (but not really) knife-and-fist fight that followed, the delay was enough to derail a suicide that he had been plotting for _ages_, a suicide that would have been the formative event of a child sociopath. It only got worse from there. On their second playdate, he had been forced to abandon his plans to make the gas station near his school explode - but even that was acceptable, on some level. He could always make up for it later.

But the _third_ fight, that's when Shizu-chan crossed a line. Distracted as he was by the projectile traffic signs, Izaya had completely forgotten about his two o'clock client. A _client_. Imagine!

He thinks, rather sourly, that Shizu-chan would have been overjoyed to know how much trouble he was causing.

He also thinks, a little less sourly, that sometimes the fun of being chased _is_ actually worth it. He knows from disappointments past that not very many people can keep up with him. The fact that such an _idiot_ is capable of it...makes his head hurt, in all the best ways.

Unfortunately, that doesn't change the fact that there is a whole _world_ beyond Shizu-chan, and Izaya just absolutely, positively needs to concentrate on all of his beloved humans instead of singling out one of them.

Besides, Shizu-chan is nothing but trouble. He knows this, just like how he knows that the sky is blue, just like how he knows that there are 100 centimeters in a meter, just like how he knows that Shinra is an adorable little creep who is only fluent in amino acids and bullshit-that's-only-as-bullshit-as-you-make-it.

Izaya doesn't have time for Shizu-chan's brand of trouble. He has plenty of his own to deal with. Which is an understatement in so many ways, but the short story is that the yakuza know him by name and face, and they're not too pleased with him at the moment, and he hasn't done nearly enough to pacify them (well, to be more accurate, he hasn't done_ anything_ to pacify them), so being Orihara Izaya is a pretty dangerous prospect right now.

Okay, so it's basically his fault, but he doesn't want to _die, _you know?

Hasn't left enough of a mark on the human race yet.

Probably never will.

Not by his standards, anyways.

That's why he is running away today, not from Shizu-chan, but from a little mob of professional criminals who really should have known better than to follow him into a dark alley. You don't follow childish sociopathic manipulative bastards into dark alleys. Even if you _are_ a childish sociopathic manipulative bastard. It's common sense.

Now, _usually_ he likes to leave people without common sense alive, because the world is more interesting with them in it, but today he doesn't feel terribly like himself.

He doesn't give them a whisper of warning, doesn't even talk down to them. He just turns his head, flashing his beautiful little flickblade, and stabs the first one in the throat, slicing right through the trachea with a satisfying little pop. The middle-aged, saggy face contorts in a silent grimace. The others have fallen silent, they hesitate for the briefest of moments. Izaya doesn't need a second opportunity. They go down in quick succession, one by one by one by one, until there's a neat pathway of corpses. The ones closest to the end of the alley died facing him. The ones closest to the exit are all turned away, like cowards.

It shouldn't have been done. It shouldn't have been possible. Izaya is Izaya and Izaya has control, where's his control gone? He thinks about protozoans and he shudders a bit. He shouldn't have won.

Only a monster could've taken down a group of yakuza with nothing but a flickblade. He doesn't want to be a monster. He wants to be a God.

It looks like he still has a lot to learn.

Ah, he thinks, as he steps over the corpses and leaves the silent alleyway, this is why I can't die.

The sky is so, so very blue today, especially compared to the scene that he just left for the local law enforcement to clear up.

He contemplates it, feeling the sunshine on his face. It's warm. He touches his skin, takes his own pulse. 60 beats per second, slow and strong and steady. And then, all of a sudden, it's thumping in his chest, not because of residual adrenaline (those people aren't even worth raising his heartrate for), but because he smells monster on the horizon.

"IIIIIIZAAAAAAYAAAAA!"

Ah, he thinks just a little mournfully, as Shizu-chan chases him down with a traffic light.

Ah, he thinks with a satisfied little sigh, when Shizu-chan is hit by a cargo truck.

Ah, he thinks, with the startling clarity of hindsight, munching on little slice of ootoro and watching as the police take his distraction away, _this _is why I can't die.


	6. Chapter 6

Despite the somewhat misleading title, THIS IS NOT A NICE CHAPTER.

**Warning: possible triggers ahead. **

* * *

Nice

* * *

He has nice customers, sometimes.

He can always tell when they're nice. It's kind of like a brand, a permanent mark on their bodies. If he were a conman he'd have the easiest job in the world - he'd know exactly who to scam next. They're lucky that he isn't a conman. _Everybody_'s lucky that he isn't a conman.

Nice does not necessarily mean boring, though. Sometimes he has a charming old librarian asking for falsified paternity test results. Sometimes he has a sweet schoolboy asking for a body dumping site. Sometimes he has a young lady like Sato Hikaru, who arrives in a pair of high heels borrowed from her mother and says, "I want somebody to rape me."

He doesn't even blink. More puzzled than surprised - though not much surprises him nowadays - he looks up at her and says, "Go to a sleazy bar at midnight, then."

"That doesn't work," she says, with the childish impatience of somebody who's already tried, and failed, and doesn't know why.

"You know that for a fact?"

"Nice people everywhere," she says, with in a sharp voice full of resentment, "won't let anything happen."

He smiles at her. "Well, if at first you don't succeed...get blackout drunk and try again."

She bites her lip.

Izaya plays a quick game of solitaire while she's busy trying to find her next words. He is not disappointed.

"...but then," she almost whispers, "I wouldn't - I wouldn't remember it." She falters under the heavy amusement in his gaze, but continues talking anyways. "I want to remember it. I want to dream about it." Her face is flushed red with shame.

Ah, Izaya thinks. So that's it. "Do you _want_ to be raped or do you _need_ to be raped?" he asks. It's good to be clear on these things, you know.

"I don't _need_ it," she snaps back quickly, toying with her skirt.

"So it's just a fantasy?"

"It's..." the girl squeezes her eyes shut. "...I don't know what it is," she whispers hoarsely, curling in on herself.

"Are you a virgin?" he asks bluntly.

She glares at him. It reminds him of a fluffed up bird - obviously upset but not the least bit threatening. "That's none of your business," she says.

"As a matter of fact, it is," Izaya replies patiently. "Some of the people I know only go for virgins."

"Oh." She looks a little sick. "I don't - I didn't - " she clutches her purse and glances at the door. He's over the desk in an instant, snatching her wrist and dragging her back to the chair. She _is_ a client, after all, and Izaya doesn't like disappointing his clients.

She's trembling, clenching her thighs together.

_Interesting_. "So you're not a virgin," he says speculatively.

Her eyes are very round, like an owl's. Terrified, but not of him. Of herself.

"...Because you've already been raped before," Izaya continues, thoughtfully.

She flinches.

"...and you liked it." It's not a question. He's willing to bet money that he's right.

Another flinch, even more violent than the last. Her mouth hangs open, just barely, like she wants to say something. She doesn't, though. Of course she doesn't.

He bares his teeth. "Am I to assume that you can't find a boyfriend willing to do this for you?"

"He loves me," she says.

"And there's nobody else you can go to?"

"I love him, too." Which really explains a lot. Which really explains everything. She can't cheat on him. She _loves him_.

Ah, well. That's life, isn't it? Izaya leans back, satisfied with her answers. "I can't guarantee anything, but if you don't mind dressing up for the occasion...I might know somebody who matches your requirements."

"Dressing up how?" There's hope in her voice - hope and disgust and self-hatred. Heaps and heaps of it.

"Red dress, black pumps. Go to sixth street - that's his hunting ground."

She looks up, and there's the faint glimmer of a smile on her face, shameful but content. "Thank you," she says.

"I'll bill you for it after the fact," he says. "You don't have to pay unless it works."

The smile widens. "Thank you."

He can always tell when he has a nice customer.


End file.
